1. Coding Assessment

The first step in the process typically involves receiving a coding assessment. This is a standardized test designed to evaluate your programming skills, problem-solving ability, and efficiency in writing clean, optimized code. TikTok uses these assessments to gauge your technical competency before moving forward with interviews.

Once you receive the assessment, you'll have two weeks to complete and submit it.

Unlike traditional coding assessments that focus heavily on algorithmic challenges from platforms like LeetCode, these interview questions emphasize real-world and practical coding. This means they’re designed to test how you apply coding principles to solve problems you’d likely encounter in an actual development role.

The structure includes:

• A few multiple-choice questions (MCQs) – These could cover areas like programming concepts, best practices, code efficiency, debugging techniques, or language-specific details.
• Debugging task – You’ll be given a piece of code with errors and asked to identify and fix the issues. This assesses your ability to analyze, troubleshoot, and correct code efficiently.
• Fill in the remaining code – Instead of writing a full solution from scratch, you may be presented with a partially completed code snippet where you need to correctly implement the missing logic. This tests your understanding of code flow and ability to seamlessly integrate functional components.
• Two LeetCode-style questions – Despite the focus on practicality, you’ll still need to tackle a couple of traditional algorithm-based problems. These might involve topics like arrays, graphs, recursion, or dynamic programming but would likely be relevant to real-world applications.